Pakistan is Developing Its Own Facial Recognition System for Security Purposes

Pakistan gets its own a facial recognition system that can be used in video surveillance.

The Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunications is working on developing its own facial recognition system that can be used with video surveillance systems. The MoIT mentions that this system will be available soon.

“It will not only add value to international research scenarios but will also contribute to a better society,” mentioned official sources at IGNITE (formerly known as National ICT R&D Fund) on Wednesday.

The facial recognition system will be marketed by a startup that focuses on video surveillance. Furthermore, it will be made available and sold as a stand-alone FPGA-based prototype solution.

The project is being developed by PAF-Karachi Institute of Economics and Technology, and will cost around Rs 13.84 million. It is being developed under the name of ‘Design and Development of an FPGA-Based Multi-Scale Face Recognition System.’

According to sources familiar with the project, they mention that for security applications, using facial recognition tech is the best choice.

Currently, to secure a facility, companies have traditionally relied on means and strategies such as smart cards, keys and passwords. In short, these security strategies corresponded to “what you have” or “what you know”.

The problem with these traditional systems of ensuring security was that “these systems could be easily fooled.” For example, you could forget the password or use the same password for multiple facilities, making it easier to get hacked. Even cards or keys can be stolen and then misused.

A safer approach to securing your facility would be to go with the use of biometrics. With such security measures, you have strategies that correspond to “what you are” or “what you exhibit.”

Facial recognition technology seems a more suitable and natural choice as compared to the other available biometric security measures, such as speech, iris, fingerprints, hand geometry and gait. It is pocket friendly, requires minimal user cooperation and is also non-intrusive. It is also relatively cheaper to implement.

“This project focuses on design and development of a high speed FPGA-based multi-scale face recognition system using Linear Binary Pattern (LBP) features”- sources.

How Will the Facial Recognition Work?

The facial recognition system being developed by MoITT is giving special emphasis to algorithm design that can be efficiently included in the hardware. The technology will rely on the face’s texture information being extracted by LBP features. The texture information would become part of wavelet decomposition, and include sub-bands that could prove useful for classification purposes.

To put it simply, these sub-bands could easily identify ‘discriminating’ features on a person and help anyone from researchers to law-enforcement authorities to find who they are looking for quicker than ever.

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IDEAS 2018

Strange, very strange. I saw this already in a demo at IDEAS 2008. Two years ago at IDEAS 2016, I saw a demo of the system where it could recognize individuals, pull up their names and CNIC numbers from NADRA database. Those unknown were tagged like unknown1, unknown2. The software would track the individual until he went out of the camera’s lens.

I don’t know why they are wasting money on something that is already made and available for use.
They do the same in NSA, ditch what is already made and available and dish out millions to contractors for building the same thing again.

Mansur

Great.

Husain

The one that you are referring, was it developed by any local company/university or foreign company?

Generally, foreign companies charge millions of dollars, putting a heavy burden on our foreign reserves. This one in the news is made locally. Another benefit of producing it locally is that we can modify it as we want, we can even sell it to foreign countries to get foreign reserves.

Similarly it was heard that NADRA pays million of dollars yearly licence cost for the finger print recognition system, however at Pakistan we can easily do the project locally.

Majid Ali

Agreed,In phase 2 they will say we are going to analyse voice data too.